The Weekly Blog

Tiger of the Week: Jonathan Safran Foer ’99

Author Jonathan Safran Foer ’99 earned acclaim for the captivating prose in his first two novels, Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. His newest work, the nonfiction book Eating Animals, is drawing a different sort of attention for its controversial, compelling take on, well, eating meat. Foer’s route to vegetarianism is described in an excerpt published in the food issue of The New York Times Magazine earlier this month. (In it, he briefly mentions wrestling with the morality of eating meat during his time as a philosophy major at Princeton.)

Foer shared some of his views during a recent edition of Larry King Live, and The Huffington Post has launched a series of essays responding to Eating Animals. Aaron Gross, founder of the advocacy group Farm Forward, wrote the introduction, describing the book as “part personal journey, part modern muckraking and a surprisingly candid and empathetic book on food.” Actress Natalie Portman followed with a review in which she said the book changed her “from a 20-year vegetarian to a vegan activist.”